Thursday, January 18, 2018

CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, 2018 EDITION

Portions of an interview with EPA chief Scott Pruitt appeared on the CBS Evening News last night. Pruitt, of course, sought to justify his pro-industry bias.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told CBS News that a partnership with "industry" is necessary in order for the agency to protect the environment.

"This paradigm that says we have to choose industry over the environment or the environment over industry is the old way of thinking," Pruitt told CBS News' chief White House correspondent Major Garrett in an interview Wednesday.

"Now that serves political ends but it doesn't serve the environment because I will tell you this: to achieve what we want to achieve in environmental protection, environmental stewardship, we need the partnership of industry," he added.

Watch the segment, or at least watch it up through Pruitt's first statement.

So we spent the past year trying to achieve regulatory certainty, regulatory clarity, to make sure that people knew what was expected of them so they could invest, achieve good outcomes for the environment.

Just from looking at his career, we know Pruitt is lying about his concern for the environment. But notice his use of the word "people." When Pruitt says "people," he means "corporations." He means "industry executives." He's in a job in which he's supposed to serve all Americans, but his identification with industry is so absolute that, in his mind, the word "people" doesn't refer to the overall populace. It refers only to corporations and their officers.

At the end of the clip he uses the word "people" again, also in the course of feigning concern for the environment:

And I will tell you, if we have companies, industries, citizens, who violate the law, we're going to prosecute them. But we should not start from the premise that all people are that way, or all industry is that way.

Again who are the "people"? For Pruitt, "all people are that way" is equivalent to "all industry is that way."

Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people." Scott Pruitt throws in a reference to "citizens" in that last soundbite. But there's no reason to believe that he thinks are people are people. We're certainly not the people for his purposes.